But this book club is unique. It is a cleverly-plumbed system of benefits flowing outwards to readers and publishers, and circulating internally to the producers of poetry – the poets.

By selecting quarterly poetry book choices, recommendations and special commendations, the PBS creates a network of disinterested response to new work that's invaluable and rare. Where else are poetry collections – all the poetry collections published in a single quarter, in fact – read, considered, discussed? Each year, a rotating pair of judges selects the book club's titles. The judges are not an "old guard" of conservatives. New poets publish books every year, and new poets are regularly invited to form the selection panel. There is no career pstructure in poetry. But it is considered a professional honour to be invited to be a PBS selector, and I know of no one who has failed to take the job seriously. In this way, the Poetry Book Society maintains a balance between tradition and openness. It allows a continuing conversation of poets with each other, with the past, with the future.

Having a book picked out by the selectors has always been a milestone for poets, signalling achievement or progress. Before the inception of the TS Eliot prize, the judges' quarterly choice, in practical terms, merely boosted visibility and enhanced sales. But it meant a great deal more than that for the poets concerned. That word, choice, was like a gold medal. When my 1983 collection, Star Whisper, was named a PBS choice, it was a defining moment in my confidence as a writer.

On other occasions my work was recommended, or received a special commendation. That lesser accolade (the silver medal?) is also enormously encouraging to the writer. If the book receives few other comments or reviews, it still has a little badge of honour, printed on the cover for all to see.

As a young poet, I had never studied creative writing; I didn't even take an English degree. As a self-taught poet, I needed all the feedback I could get. I don't think it's very different for today's young poets. They are worse off, in some ways. When I was young, there were heavyweight poetry critics – people like Ian Hamilton and Peter Porter – who regularly reviewed new work, and were fearless if they found it wanting. Today, there are fewer critical spaces, and there is less honesty in criticism. A small-press poetry publisher I met recently told me that there were magazines to which he no longer bothered sending work – not because the book would be ignored, or slated, but because it wouldn't receive serious critical appraisal.

The Poetry Book Society doesn't simply award or withhold approbation. The selectors write a report on the books chosen, and the poets write a short piece about their book. These are published in a wonderful little quarterly bulletin, together with sample poems. The PBS bulletins are a brilliant resource – for teaching, writing, thinking about contemporary poetry and its history. On the 50th anniversary of the PBS some of the poets' pieces were collected into a handsome hardback, Don't Ask Me What I Mean, edited by Clare Brown and Don Paterson. The angle was an amusing one: that poets dislike talking about their work. But poets often talk very well about their work, as this collection proved. Sadly, it doesn't look as if there will be a further collection when the PBS reaches 100.

If the PBS disappears, it will be a huge loss to the young poets of today and tomorrow. Previous generations, mine included, learnt from our successes and failures, from selectors' comments that made us think about our work, from taking a turn as a selector, and from our sharpened awareness of what other writers were doing. This was not a learning-curve for the elite. It was an open university for poets, and its grateful alumni are countless. I hope they will all come forward now.